When Woody Allen made his comment the other day re: the Harvey Weinstein case, saying ‘we shouldn’t let this turn into a witch hunt,’ he was widely and instantly mocked, because that is the nature of social media, the witch-hunty nature of social media. Of course, Woody Allen. First, he played a borderline pervert in most of his films, at any rate a weird, older guy who inexplicably was romantically linked with smoking hot younger women. (I, too, am a weird, older guy who is inexplicably married to a hotter, much younger woman.) Also, he was accused of molesting his step-daughter when she was 7, but it was never proven in court, and might well have been a trumped up charge by Mia Farrow, who was pissed off because he was having an affair with her adult step-daughter, which everyone found really skeezy at the time but that was 1997 and Allen and Soon-Yi Previn are still married.

A witch hunt, he said. Well, seeing all of the ‘me,too’ comments on Facebook today, it’s hard to deny there is a serious problem. Men are often cruder than we should be, and some are, no doubt about it, creeps.

BUT. One of my female friends added an extension to her ‘me, too’ comment saying that men should post and apologize for all the times we’ve made crude, sexist jokes or stared at a woman’s breasts instead of looking her in the eye. Partly, I thought, that might have been a humble brag on her part, because she is, indeed, a lady with quite ample breasts, but mostly I just felt it was witch-hunty.
Sure, guys need to be a bit classier, not just shouting lewd comments at women they don’t even know, and refrain from touching women who don’t want to be touched, but we’re not going to stop being aware of women’s bodies, or the attractiveness thereof, and the difference between a sex joke and a sexist joke is a fine line, that not everybody draws in the exact same place.

In short: women are perfectly justified in objecting to male behavior. They are unreasonable if they actually expect some kind of a change in our biology.